In some wireless local area networks, operations that deal with aggregation of bandwidth across multiple channels is inefficient. For example, in some 802.11ac systems, the channel bonding procedure allows for bonding and operating only 40 MHz, 80 MHz and 160 MHz channel bandwidths. However, because 802.11 systems must also allow for legacy devices that operate mostly at 20 MHz and 40 MHz bandwidths, when legacy devices are present in dense deployments, it is challenging to find 40 MHz, 80 MHz and 160 MHz of bandwidth that is free and available for transmission. Further, dense environments are often not well suited for contiguous bonding of channels and the bandwidth availability may change quite dynamically.